TMNT Co-Creator Discusses Leaked Movie Script

Even though production on the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie halted in June, a version of a script for the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie leaked online. Several people have criticized the screenplay after reading the draft. One of the most notable is TMNT co-creator Peter Laird.

The script, which has not been confirmed as an official script, revealed a story that showed 18-year-old Casey Jones discovering the grown Turtles in a secret lab in Michigan. It is revealed that they were normal turtles exposed to ooze, trained by Splinter in the sewers and named after famous artists, as their original origin entails. However, the script then deviates from lore with Colonel Schrader (in lieu of Shredder) and the advent of Dimension X. An old Turtle Warrior, the Ninja Turtles’ parents, Krang and the Technodrome all make appearances as a complex plot then unravels involving Dimension X’s political unrest and their own war-stopping destiny.

Peter Laird took to his blog to discuss the script:

Someone else alerted me to the existence of this script, and I just a few minutes ago finished reading it. If it is, in fact, the actual draft that was rejected and caused the production of the next TMNT movie to be pushed back to 2014 because the script was unsatisfactory, then I think all true TMNT fans should be grateful to the new ‘powers that be’ that they did not allow this wretched thing to go any further. It could definitely be taken as a good sign if that is the case.

I think the script that I read is so fundamentally flawed, and — more to the point — so NOT a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie, that trying to make piecemeal changes to it in an effort to make it into something halfway decent is probably a fool’s errand.

In my opinion, the thing should just be tossed out, deliberately forgotten, and the process of generating a new script — really a new outline, then treatment, then script — should be started again. I have no insider knowledge of what’s going on with the movie, but from the bits and pieces that have slipped out, it seems like that may be exactly what is happening.

While we’re on the subject of this script… I have to say that while reading it, and especially reading the last twenty pages or so, I couldn’t help but think of the brouhaha which erupted a few months back when Michael Bay was heard to say that in the upcoming movie, the Turtles would be revealed to be “from an alien race”, and following that, all the mental gymnastics indulged in by people who wanted to parse his words and make it seem like “No, he didn’t REALLY say they were going to be ALIENS!”… and then this script makes it way out onto the Internet, and if it is legitimate, it’s painfully clear that YES, the Turtles WERE, in fact, going to be ALIENS.